Like a business, a blog needs solid foundations

By Bob Toovey on January 20, 2012

Any one who blogs about their business, they want their posts and pages to make some kind of difference. That difference could be in a increase in orders or a better relationship with current and future customers.

To make a difference you need solid foundations to work from. A blog needs certain important pages and posts that you can build from. Pages that state exactly who you are and what you do. Posts that demonstrate product and service knowledge.

Pages that you should have

Every business blog really should have…

A contact page – with a commitment to answer email within a certain time period,see my post this, Are you committed to your contact page?
About/Who am I etc – just who are you exactly, share some personal details, qualifications and passions etc. See my post about these pages and why you should write in the first person, Let your personality shine through your site and win over new customers
Testimonials page – Demonstrate that people do trust you and are happy to buy or use your services. Ask for a testimonial and list them, see Why you should have a testimonial page on your business blog for more.
Links to your social media pages – Make your customers aware of how else they can find you. They may prefer to interact with you there than on your blog.
Links to your own business site – if your blog is an addition to an existing site then make sure you link to it so visitors can find it easily.

With these basic pages, you can give essential information to the visitor and potential client. But you can also build on them. Blog posts can extend a pages topic, write more about yourself and things that you like. Write a post that comments on what’s happening on your social media sites pages, invite blog visitors to take part.

Extending the foundations

Once you have been blogging for a while, you may have a few posts that are on a similar topic, a series as it were. You may have posts about products, reviews of new ones and information on their use etc. You can create a page that groups them together, I called my page, Feature Posts. A sort of mini index that highlights things for the visitor.

An extra page to consider adding on is for your mailing list. Include the reasons why and the benefits of signing up and of course the sign up form itself.

During the first few weeks of the blogs existence, write a post that focuses on your products and services. This should be detailed, researched and as long as it needs be. Consider it your corner-stone, the one that you often link back to in future posts.

Blogs don’t stand still

I have described the basic pages and posts you need to a solid foundation to your site. However, as a site develops and changes, so can the foundations. Extra pages can be added, existing ones edited to reflect changes or updates to the business.

This entry is filed under Blogging and tagged blog, blogging, pages, posts.

SEO your pictures for Google Image search (part two – WordPress)

By Bob Toovey on January 18, 2012

In part one of SEO your pictures for Google Image search, we took a look at ‘non-blog’ sites and how to optomise pictures with the HTML image tag and surrounding words. As a reminder, the image tag written as…

<img src="my-image.png" alt="alternative text goes here" title="extra goes here" />

As before, the placement of surrounding words is very important. However, WordPress makes it very easy to fill in the necessary part of the image tag. So easy, all we do is fill in the blanks and that’s it.

Title is for the text that appear in the tool tip, the text that appears when the mouse hovers over a picture. Alternative text is for browsers that can’ show images, some times used by brail enabled browsers.

Caption allows you to display text underneath a picture, it’s look depends on the theme you are using.

Description is used internally so when you look through your gallery you have a better idea of what the picture was used for.

Even though WordPress makes it easy to add pictures, always take a minute to add as much info as you can. Ensure your keywords that relate to the picture are used before and after.

This entry is filed under DIYSEO and tagged google, google image search, images, pictures, seo, wordpress.

What is the point of a business blog?

By Bob Toovey on January 16, 2012

A business friend of mine said to me a few days ago, “what’s the point of writing for my blog, no one reads it”. She was speaking about her blog that is attached to her online shop. The general assumption is that you should have a business blog but do you know why you should?

More pages for the search engines

Most businesses don’t have extensive websites. If you are small or a one-man-band then you most likely have a 5 page site. It won’t change and nothing for the search engines to come back for – nothing new to see. Add a blog and write a post a week and you will have, after a year, 52 new pages.

Not for you, it’s for your customers

A blog is not really for you or your business. It’ a communication channel, the way in which you demonstrate knowledge, announce new products. A way in which potential customers can ask questions, existing clients can keep in touch with new developments. So you business blog is for them, your customers.

Discovery – from visitor to customer

Having a 5 page website means less chance of being found on search engine results pages. You can increase your exposure by having more pages. A blog can do this for you easily, use it as a marketing tool. An almost free tool that can help you with social media by using RSS feeds etc.

Do you really mean, ‘no one reads it?’

One last thing, when you claim that no one reads your business blog, do you have the figures to prove it? Are you using an analytic’s package? Is there in fact, a lot of people visiting your blog but leaving disappointed that there is nothing new to see?

This entry is filed under Blogging and tagged blog, business, business blogging, visitors.

How to Improve Your SEO

By Bob Toovey on January 13, 2012

This is a guest post by James Williams who is the Community Manager for TM International, a Paris-based recruitment agency

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important things to consider when building an online marketing strategy. The challenge lies in maintaining relevance in the eyes of search engines, and as Google is by far the largest and most influential search engine (with over 1 billion hits per month) one of the most important aims of your online marketing strategy has to be to dominate Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Without implementing solid SEO strategies you’re website will be about as useful as a shop with no windows and no sign. You want, or should I say need, people to find you and with a few simple strategies you can.

So here are some things that we have done, and that you can do, to improve our website’s SEO strength.

Firstly, you need to think about your URL with regard to two things: Format and Content. Now I’m going to assume you know not to use spaces in your URL but what is quite a common mistake is putting in an underscore to separate words. Due to the algorithms embedded in a search engine like Google, this will cause it to identify the URL as one big word and therefore will reduce your chance of people finding you in a keyword search. However, what you can do is use dashes – problem solved. The content of your URL is also crucial. If you include what are known as “stop words” such as “the”, “what” or “it” the chances are most search engines will actually ignore them and therefore weaken you’re SEO. So take a look at your URL(s) and make sure they are formatted correctly and remove stop words.

Another classic (and essential) trick to improve your SEO ranking is by identifying and utilizing keywords. By using keyword rich title tags on each page of your website you can give yourself the best chance of dominating SERPs and therefore maximize potential income. It’s important to take <title> tags (found in the title bar of the browser) into consideration as search engines use them to ascertain what type of content appears on the page. If you enter keywords into your <title> tag instead of your company name it will prove advantageous for your SEO ranking. Be careful not to exceed the 60 character limit though, as it would be cut-off. You can also add a list of keywords to your back office which site visitors cannot see. For example we specialize in the recruitment of bilingual assistants and secretaries and therefore have identified every relevant keyword and added it to our list.

To track the progress of your site rankings you can use an analytics program, the largest being Google Analytics. Using the different tools involved you will be able to track which keywords, search engines and traffic sources are proving most beneficial in terms of bringing in business. This information is invaluable when it comes to identifying how to improve your SEO ranking. As a Community Manager I use Google Analytics to know where to spend my time. I can understand what works well, what needs improvement and ultimately I can measure the benefits of my efforts.

It can also be very beneficial to add a blog to your site. If you regularly update your blog with new posts and fresh content you can drive traffic to your site through an improved SEO. This is because search engines love fresh content. So, I try to update our blog about 3 or 4 times a week to give our site’s SEO the greatest advantage. Blogs can also be a great way of interacting with customers, and potential customers, which not only helps you in a marketing context but also increases the value in an SEO context. Now more than ever “the fresher the better” applies to your website and its SEO ranking, as Google have recently announced a change to its search algorithm. So keep it fresh!

So there are some simple SEO tips to get started with. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s now becoming more and more apparent that you need to stay up to date with potential future trends so you can adapt and maintain and improve your SEO ranking. With the buzz around Google+ being “the next big thing” for business the result is sure to affect SEO in a big way. I won’t go into too much detail or attempt to predict the future but it seems that the “+1” feature is likely to become particularly important when developing an SEO strategy. Companies will have to adapt their strategy to optimize for recommendations to stay ahead of competitors. Searching is becoming social; Make sure you stay ahead of the curve.

This entry is filed under Guest Post, seo and tagged james, keywords, search, seo.

Poll: Are you really looking after your WordPress site?

By Bob Toovey on January 11, 2012

Inspired by a Facebook chat with Sally Walker (excellent services by the way) regarding WordPress, plugins and installation backup’s, I want to know how often do you backup your site?

It is very important to ensure that you have the very latest WordPress files and that your plugins are up to date. It all helps to stop hackers from getting in to your site.

Please leave your vote in the poll below…

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This entry is filed under wordpress and tagged plugins, poll, updates, wordpress.

SEO your pictures for Google Image search (part one – non blogs)

By Bob Toovey on January 10, 2012

Pictures on a web page can generate extra traffic, thanks to Google Image Search. To get this boost you need to think about how pictures are added to a page and the text that surrounds them.

For websites (not blogs)

Take a read of my previous article about naming of pictures if you have not already. It is important that you get the name of the picture correct as it helps with getting traffic. Basically, use keywords in the file name of the picture but ensure it is a unique name.

Standard HTML coding for pictures is

<img src="name-of-picture.png" />

Now that CSS rules the web and standards are being followed (in most browsers but not all), we can leave the extra tags such as; Width, Height and Border. They should be dealt with using CSS.

In my article about naming image files, I explained how the ALT tag should be used as part of SEO (as is the file name). It should be a description using keywords for the page it appears on. Remember there are browsers for the blind and partially sighted so make sure it makes sense!

The ‘perfect sponge cake’ example

For a recipe website with a page all about the perfect sponge cake, you have a picture of the finished article. So lets name it, add the ALT and TITLE tag…

<img src="perfect-sponge-cake.png" alt="a perfect sponge cake that anyone can make" title="Make the perfect sponge cake" />

The ALT tag carries the keywords used in the file name as does the TITLE tag.

Choose your words before and after the picture.

Google gets some clues for Image Search from the ALT tag and file name. We can be more helpful by using keywords before and after the picture. For example…

<H1>How to make a perfect Sponge Cake</H1>
<p>In this recipe we will make a perfect sponge cake that anyone can do!</p>
<img src="perfect-sponge-cake.png" alt="a perfect sponge cake that anyone can make" title="Make the perfect sponge cake" />
<p>For this sponge cake you will need the following...</p>

As you can see, lots of mentions of “Sponge Cake” before the image, inside the image tag and after.

If anyone does an image search for ‘sponge cake’, the picture will be included in the search and hopefully fairly high up in the results. Just make sure that the picture is of high quality and large. Big pictures will do better than tiny ones and the better looking they are the more likely they will be clicked.

This entry is filed under DIYSEO and tagged google, google image search, images, pictures, seo.

WordPress 3.1.1 update now available

By Bob Toovey on January 7, 2012

The latest incarnation of WordPress is a wonderful beast. The admin side looks great and slightly easier to get around. However this is now a maintenance update you should be installing.

‘Version 3.3.1 addressed a security issue and fixed 15 bugs. For more information, see the release notes.

As ever, make sure you backup your site and database before any update.

This entry is filed under wordpress and tagged bugs, security, update.

QR Codes, learn from big business failures

By Bob Toovey on January 5, 2012

QR Flash code

QR codes will be big this year, we are going to find them everywhere. Not every business will find them useful but many are going to try.

In December, Mashable published, The Top QR Code Fails of 2011. It seems even big business can foul things up.

Looking back over 2011′s QR code campaigns, Mike McGuinness, VP of sales for QRblaster.com, a firm that generates QR codes, has identified five of the top QR Code fails of 2011. If you’re a marketer eager to hop on the QR code trend, you might want to learn from these negative examples

This entry is filed under Business ideas and tagged failure, flash codes, QR Codes.

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